Okay - here’s what I’m trying to do:
I’m using EE to build an Intranet for a local company. The website will be hosted online (not on a localhost), so employees can login from anywhere. Everything will only be available to logged-in members who are all verified employees.
One section of the intranet will be a contacts database of sorts. Every weblog entry will have standard information associated with it (name, address, etc), but additionally, I need to associate each with a Word document on the networked file server of the company.
Ideally, I’d like for the user to see a file upload field, where they can choose the right Word document via the Browse box. But when they submit the form, instead of uploading the file, I just want to save the full path to the file (like, H:\\Documents\2008\file.doc), and then in my templates, I’ll insert that path in a regular HTML link, so the file opens when they click it.
The reasons the client doesn’t want it uploaded:
1) the documents change on a regular basis. Pointing to it directly on the file server means anyone can open it and make changes to it, hit Save, and that’s it. No continuous re-uploading required.
2) there’s a good couple hundred of these documents, if not more. It seems a bit superfluous to pay for the extra disk space and bandwidth to a web host if we can avoid it, as there’s no need for these files to live online.
3) security wise, the company would prefer for these files to stay on their file server only, instead of online. Employees working from home won’t ever have to access them, so again, there’s no real need to have them online.
I have tried creating a regular Text custom field, and in a SAEF, turned it into a type=“file” field. That did give me the Browse box, but the field just gets submitted as empty. I couldn’t find any extensions that give the option of just saving the path to the file instead of actually uploading it.
Is this at all possible to do? Thanks in advance for any help!